Amazon RDS - How AWS Pricing Works
Estimating Amazon RDS costs

Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, so you can focus on your applications and business.

Estimating Amazon RDS costs

The factors that drive the costs of Amazon RDS include:

  • Database instance hours: Resources incur charges when they are running; for example, from the time you launch a database instance until you terminate it.

  • Database characteristics: The physical capacity of the database you choose will affect how much you are charged. Database characteristics vary depending on the database engine, size, and memory class.

  • Database purchase type: When you use On-Demand database instances, you pay for compute capacity for each hour your database instance runs, with no required minimum commitments. With Reserved database Instances, you can make a low, one-time, up-front payment for each database Instance you wish to reserve for a one or three-year term.

  • Number of database instances: With Amazon RDS, you can provision multiple database instances to handle peak loads.

  • Provisioned database storage: There is no additional charge for backup storage of up to 100 percent of your provisioned database storage for an active database Instance. After the database Instance is terminated, backup storage is billed per GB per month.

  • Additional storage: The amount of backup storage in addition to the provisioned storage amount is billed per GB per month.

  • Long Term Retention: Long Term Retention is priced per vCPU per month for each database instance in which it is enabled. The price depends on the Amazon RDS instance type used by your database, and may vary by region. If Long Term Retention is turned off, performance data older than seven days is deleted.

  • API Requests: The API free tier includes all calls from the Performance Insights dashboard as well as 1 million calls outside of the Performance Insights dashboard. API requests outside of the Performance Insights free tier are charged at $0.01 per 1,000 requests.

  • Deployment type: You can deploy your DB Instance to a single Availability Zone (analogous to a standalone data center) or multiple Availability Zones (analogous to a secondary data center for enhanced availability and durability). Storage and I/O charges vary, depending on the number of Availability Zones you deploy to.

  • Data transfer: Inbound data transfer is free, and outbound data transfer costs are tiered based on the destination.

Depending on your application’s needs, it’s possible to optimize your costs for Amazon RDS database instances by purchasing reserved Amazon RDS database instances. To purchase RIs, you make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

For more information, see Amazon RDS pricing.